RFC-193
by Darius Kazemi, July 12 2019
In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.
Checking the boxes
RFC-193 is titled “Network Checkout”. It's authored by Harslem and Heafner of RAND, and dated July 14, 1971.
The technical content
The RAND site is in charge of maintaining up-to-date knowledge of compatibility with network services at different host sites. This RFC is their update to the Network Working Group, in the form of a feature grid.
Worth noting is that the RFC-107 version of the Network Control Program is fully implemented at 7 out of 10 sites, compared to the RFC-1 version that was only ever implemented at 5 of these. The site with the most software capability is the Sigma 7 at UCLA, which makes sense as this was one of the first computers to be part of the ARPANET project. In fact, it may look on the chart like it's missing one piece of capability, a “telnet-like protocol”, but that's actually a stopgap protocol that is unofficial, but included since it's used at 3 sites.
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About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.